There are many human interface input devices for data, control and command entry into computers and other systems that are in common use. These input devices are typified by keyboards, mice, touch pads, joysticks, graphics tablets and various motion sensitive or motion activated controllers. These input devices are routinely encountered in home, office or industrial settings or in the rapidly expanding areas of console, computer and on-line gaming. There are also many interface devices that have been custom designed for automation and robotic control or to provide alternative control and command capture methods for a wide range of specialized devices.
A new human interface approach that frees the user from many of the drawbacks of traditional input devices uses touch sensors directly embedded or otherwise integrated into fabric garments that are worn by a user. Signals generated by touching these sensors are routed through various circuits sewn, woven or otherwise integrated into or attached to the fabric are conveyed to signal processing circuits mounted at strategic locations in the garment or that may be transmitted to signal processing circuits external to the garment. The signal processing circuits analyze these signals and construct appropriate messages corresponding to the signals that can be sent to a computer or other similar equipment to simulate or mimic traditional user input devices.
One such invention is described previously in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/326,029, entitled “Apparatus and Method for Inputting Information”, and filed Jan. 4, 2006 in United States, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,498,956, issued 3 Mar. 2009. The disclosure of this patent is fully incorporated herein by reference.
The invention disclosed in the incorporated U.S. Pat. No. 7,498,956 uses a variety of touch points, or contacts, integrated into a glove. Some of these touch points are located at predefined positions along each of the user's fingers. Other contacts on the user's thumb can be manipulated through simple hand gestures to make or break connections with various contacts or combinations of contacts on the fingers, thus allowing the user's hand actions to be decoded electronically and used to input data or to control equipment. This decoding can be done in a variety of ways, for example by using a “row and column” scanning technique. For illumination, one simple form of this device could be to predefine combinations of thumb sensing contacts to finger touch point combinations as unique button presses as on a key board, therefore allowing the glove to interact with a computer in lieu of a regular keyboard.
Extensions to this concept include placing more sensing pads on the palm, on other areas of the glove or on other parts of other garments that are integrated into a larger system.
In the invention disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,498,956, each of the touch points on the fingers are located at discrete locations and are fixed in location and size. Different users of the glove may prefer the touch points to be located in different locations or to have different sizes due to physiological differences, due to ergonomic considerations, due to personal preference, or for other reasons. In addition, different touch point sizes and locations may be desirable for different applications of the glove. Fixed touch points such as in the invention disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,498,956 give an inflexible layout of touch points and may limit that adaptability of the glove to different users.
In the invention disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,498,956, each touch point on the fingers has a separate conductor that carries a signal between the touch point and interface circuitry. For the case of a glove with many touch points, this may result in a complicated glove construction with many conductors and many connections to the interface circuitry.
One possible use of a data input glove would be to provide to a computer a quasi-continuous set of data such as the position of a scroll bar slider, or a magnification for a zoom command where the position of the slider or the value of the magnification would correspond to the position where a thumb contact touches along a finger. Implementation of such functions in a glove such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,498,956 would require many finger touch points, conductors, and connections to interface circuitry to provide reasonable resolution and sometimes has a complicated construction.
The instant application fully incorporates herein by reference the provisional application entitled “Glove pattern for continuous conductive traces”, Ser. No. 61/193,308, filed by Darin Hunt, et al and filed on Nov. 17, 2009. This provisional application describes a fabric pattern that eliminates seams in the regions of touch points and sensing contacts and allows interconnecting conductive traces to connect from the front of the fingers, thumb or palm to the area of the back of the hand without crossing any seams, thus reducing the need for creating reliable electrical splices in the traces.